THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED Tan Dinh Restaurant Review

: There's always something new to try at Tân Dinh, a modest café tucked along an unimpressive strip of Gretna that just might serve the area's best---and most varied---Vietnamese cooking. Vietnamese restaurants pepper the suburbs, and pho-seekers will find better versions of the sublime noodle soup elsewhere (like at the nearby stalwart Phó Tàu Bay). Otherwise, though, the tastes of greatness are endless: roasted quail on sticky rice cakes, shrimp paste molded onto sugarcane sticks, tender goat in a coconut curry sauce, a wildly textured salad of jelly fish, pork, shrimp, raw vegetables and herbs. Every table receives a Mason jar of the house fish sauce, moderately sweetened and fired with red chiles, for sloshing over vermicelli salad bowls and the fat spring rolls; and nearly every customer indulges in a bubble tea---avocado is the favorite. The bouncy, winter-white steamed flour cakes are popular with Vietnamese diners and texturally curious Westerners; we recommend the half-dollar-size ones sprinkled with dried shrimp and mung bean powder.